With Yahoo stock at all time lows, Carl Icahn, proud owner of part of Yahoo's board and strong advocate of a sale to Microsoft, has been remarkably silent.  Meanwhile, Yahoo fell from the public eye.  It did receive a bit of good news of late -- its share of the ad market grew slightly, chipping at Google's.  Also it had a strong showing with the Olympic Games, thanks to clever linking to out of country live video.

Unfortunately, now Yahoo has been hit by more bad news.  The company’s go at social networking, "Yahoo Mash", ended unceremoniously this week.  The network was shut down after only a year of operation, joining many other failed social network ventures.

Yahoo community manager Matt Warburton sent users an email stating:

Thank you for trying out our Mash Beta service. We hope you had fun with it. Please note that we will shut down Mash on September 29, 2008. As a result, your current profile on Mash will no longer be available.

Yahoo Mash never really caught on, but it did have some loyal followers.  Part of the problem was that the site did little to distinguish itself from the social networking crowd or attract young people.

Its biggest feature was that instead of inviting your friends to join you could instead create profiles for them and then encourage them to adopt the profile and customize it.  This kind of approach was perceived by some to be somewhat invasive.

The network did provide plug-in modules, similar to a more basic form of Facebook's Apps.  It was supposed to provide a move up from Yahoo 360, the previous network that was associated with Yahoo user profiles (email) and thus automatically had millions of users.

The network marks Yahoo's second major failure in the social networking business.  Last year it shut down "Mixd", another social networking site which drew comparisons to Dodgeball and Brightkite.  Yahoo Mash ended up lasting just slight longer than Mixd, which drew "mixed" reviews and was in existence a mere few months before the plug was pulled.